Good things in the world of clean energy often can happen by pure accident. As a perfect example, I read yesterday about Engineering Professor Jerry Woodall of Purdue who had a little surprise awhile back when he washing some lab equipment and stumbled on a reaction that could just possibly make fuel cells workable.
It seems that while Professor Woodall was doing his routine lab cleaning, he inadvertently mixed water, aluminum, and gallium together and discovered what you get is hydrogen gas, a gas that literally went ‘poof” right in his face. It seems he had chanced upon the discovery that the addition of gallium to hydrogen and water allows the well known reaction of water and aluminum to be sustained in producing hydrogen – thus the little explosion in his face.
Now this technique may be able to be used commercially to solve one the biggest challenges in the fuel cell field, how to store the hydrogen we need to power fuel cells. If we could store aluminum and then produce it on demand by mixing it with water, it could be perhaps solve the real headaches the industry now has in finding a way to store hydrogen. The folks at Purdue are now working on ways to bring this discovery to application in a host of products, including the automobile.
Professor Woodall’s experience is the equivalent of the story of penicillin applied to the New Apollo Project. Penicillin was discovered by accident when the mold in a Petri dish was noticed to retard the growth of fungus in the dish. Perhaps the fuel cell will become commercially usable because of an accidental explosion in a professor’s wash tub. The only thing predictable about the New Apollo Energy Project is that success can be dependent upon the unpredictable.
So washing the dishes can really help save the planet. I guess my Mother was right after all.
